BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

We’ve had several servers recently were some services just don’t restart on a reboot. Very annoying and very difficult to troubleshoot sometimes.

One of our techs noticed this update “hidden” under optional updates and so far it has fixed all the servers we’ve applied it to. Here’s an overview of what it does:

This update contains the UDP Port Reservation Utility for Windows Server 2003. System administrators can use this utility to reserve UDP Ports that are required by most Microsoft services. System administrator might want to use this utility if certain Microsoft services cannot start because of port binding failures. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

You can download the update from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=261f7ee5-3bbb-4fd9-9e6e-29cea508f865&displaylang=en

About time too! I can’t imagine how many hours we’ve wasted over the years on hold to prove to MS  Support we really do have the issue reported in a specific hotfix.

Not any more though. As posted by Girish you can now get the hotfix by email link after accepting the MS agreement and choosing the version required. Nice one!

I’ve installed Vista SP1 on 2 machines now. My home machine and my laptop. Installation on the home machine was straightforward although it did take 50 minutes. You are warned before the install it could take an hour or more so this isn’t a trivial upgrade your customers can do in 5 mins.

On the laptop I got an installation failure due to an unsupported language:

The fix for this can be found in the following Microsoft KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947876

Technorati Tags: Vista,SP1,falure,KB947876,language

For a while now I’ve been looking for a remote desktop application that lets me sort all the servers we look after into an alphabetical list. Unfortunately Microsoft’s Remote Desktops doesn’t do this. When you have over 70 servers listed in the order they were added you can see the problem!

Last week I came across this little gem, Visionapp Remote Desktop. It does everything Remote Desktops does AND it lets me sort alphabetically. It also provides a nice overview tab that lets you instantly see which servers you are connected to as well as the ability to save different sets of authentication credentials which can be “re-used” as you add new connections.

 
click image for larger view

The best thing though is it’s free (although registration is required to download it).  So if you’re fed up searching through your list of servers for the one you want give it a go.

We got caught out by this one yesterday as the IBM server we were updating remotely with SP2 had Broadcom NIC’s installed.

In this case it was severe enough to knock out our remote access completely so we had to attend site to sort it out. Luckily one of our helpdesk techies is an avid reader of the SBS blog and he remembered seeing this article.

The old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here I think!

Looks like this is doing the rounds again but this time targeting those running Microsoft Word. If your customers download and install the “update” they’re basically installing Troj/Kango-D.

From the Sophos website:

The greeting is personalized (Dear: <firstname> <lastname>), mentions you are subscribed to the ?Microsoft Windows Update mailing list?, and asks you to download the patch from:

?http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/outlook/update-0-day/download.aspx?id=63852?

Once the above link is clicked, a request is not made to ?microsoft.com? but instead to one of many compromised sites hosting a Trojan, proactively detected by Sophos as Mal/Behav-112.

An interesting feature of this campaign is the target?s full name, and in most cases the organization they are associated with, is mentioned within the message. The samples we have received also lists a bogus Microsoft Windows Licence key, all in an attempt to make the message look legitimate to the recipient.

REGISTERED TO : <Firstname> <Lastname> , - <Organization>
Licence KEY : <key>

Sample Screenshot:

To be on the safe side we’ve blasted out an email to our customers making them aware of it.

After our recent scare with the installation of SP2 on our own SBS box we’ve now done some testing in a virtual environment and concluded, well not much really. Our test machine is a twin Xeon 3Ghz with 4Gb RAM so it isn’t exactly a slouch. As this is a virtual machine we can keep rolling it back to its previous state and run the install as many times as we like. Thing is the results vary, even though the application of the SP is consistent, sometimes the websites restart and sometimes they don’t - it’s almost as if something gets stuck or times out - very odd.

The one thing that is consistent though is that even if the websites don’t restart straight away, they always restart manually or on a second reboot, so armed with that knowledge we’re going to go ahead and start to roll it out to our clients SBS servers.

It seems that Windows Server SP2 kind of crept up on us. Normally we see loads of posts, blogs and info. about an upcoming service pack release but this one doesn’t seem to have attracted that much attention; maybe we are becoming immune to updates!

We always try to “eat our own dog food” at BMS so after having read the official SBS blog, Dave Overton’s blog and the SBS Diva we decided to take the plunge and install it on our own server before implementing it on our clients SBS boxes. Everything seemed OK until we did the required reboot at the end of the install, at which point we discovered none of the websites were working. That included the default website, WSUS administration, Sharepoint administration, Sharepoint Central Administration, Company Web and in our case the Sophos Quarantine Digest site (we run Sophos Small Business Suite AV at BMS). {GULP}.

Where to start? A quick delve into the event viewer didn’t find any error messages of note, so next stop was IIS. A big red cross confirmed none of the websites were running, so where next? Trying to start the websites in IIS didn’t work so nothing doing there. A look at add/remove programs didn’t give an option to uninstall SP2 so nothing else for it but another reboot. PHEW! This seemed to work and all websites came back up with no errors present in the event viewer.

We’re still not sure why this happened so we’re in the process of building a virtual server so we can try and replicate it. I’ll post more if we find anything concrete. Until then we’re holding off on rolling it out to our clients.

It would appear that our counterparts in the US are having a tough time of it at the moment with Daylight Saving Time changes. For those that don’t know, this year sees DST in the US starting 3 weeks earlier than normal and ending 1 week later.

Microsoft have a help & support centre for DST which outlines the changes in more detail. The confusion around what does and doesn’t require patching or updating for the change seems to be growing by the minute! Susan Bradley has a lot of posts on her blog relating to DST changes and in particular the order required, or not, of what to apply when, although it finally looks like the enormity of the task is even getting to the SBS Diva.

Once you start to understand the issues surrounding the changes required it becomes mind boggling. Just updating Exchange Server itself for Public Folders, Calendars and Outlook looks like an immense task. Then you have to start thinking about CRM, mobile devices, the list goes on and on. Right now I’m soooo glad I live in Europe. Lets just hope the EU doesn’t decide to follow suit any time soon!

Now I’ve got my external hard drive I thought I’d have another look at the backup options in Vista. Last time the option to backup to hard disk was disabled as I’d only got the one, but now I can either choose to backup files and folders or a complete image of my installation.

So the next question is how good a job does Vista do of compressing the entire contents of my hard drive? Well I have a total of 37Gb used and the compressed image ended up being 30Gb - fine if I’m storing the image on a hard drive but not so good if I want to use DVD. I just can’t see anyone sitting there feeding their computer 7-8 DVD’s to complete a full backup. C’mon Microsoft, do the decent thing and put backup to tape back in the next release please.